The charnel house at Monkstown, a structure designed to hold disinterred human remains, a practice common in medieval parishes where burial ground was limited and graves were regularly turned over, is not the kind of thing you would expect to find wedged between Carrickbrennan Road and Mounttown Road Upper. Yet there it sits, within a walled graveyard, its seventeenth-century fabric quietly enclosing a fragment of the medieval world.

The story of the structure is tangled up with the wider history of the Church of Carrickbrennan. The west gable of that medieval church was incorporated into the charnel house when the latter was built in the seventeenth century, making the building a kind of accidental palimpsest, one era folded inside another. Before any of this, the lands and tithes had belonged to St. Mary's Abbey in Dublin, but following the dissolution of the monasteries, they passed to Sir John Travers. The ecclesiastical history did not end there. In 1668, Sir Edward Corker undertook a rebuilding of the church for the parish, and further works followed in the nineteenth century, layering yet more periods of use and repair onto a site that had already accumulated several centuries of history. The surrounding graveyard, enclosed by its original walls, contains memorials from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, giving the whole enclosure a density of time that belies its unremarkable urban setting.

The site sits to the northeast of the junction of Carrickbrennan Road and Mounttown Road Upper, in what is now the built-up suburban fabric of Monkstown. The walled graveyard is the key landmark to look for; the charnel house is within it. Because the area is residential and the site is modest in scale, it rewards unhurried attention rather than a quick glance. The incorporated medieval gable is the detail most worth finding, a piece of masonry that predates everything around it and connects the site to the pre-Reformation landscape of the Dublin coast.